Comedians need something to whinge about. Unfeeling bosses, ungrateful spouses and good, old-fashioned substance abuse have long been popular afflictions. This year, all the best comic necks are attired in a new sort of millstone. Parenthood is the misery du jour.

Newcomer Anna Millers adopts a tone of sedated rage to describe her journey through gestation. She evokes a unique sort of maternal fury that might have been strained through a Valium fog.

Millers' tranquillised wrath is pitch-perfect. Her unhurried delivery is the greatest asset. The gags, however, could do with some tightening.

This is certainly not a chuckle-free affair, however, and Millers deserves untold respect for setting the term epidural to music to a great comic end.

Carolyn Chillura is a gifted physical comedian. A frenetic dance of seduction proves wonderfully absurd and is the highlight of this voyage into maternity. A racy musical number detailing the perils of post-natal sex is similarly memorable.

While Chillura is content to take commendable risks with choreography and song, she seems unwilling to endanger herself to the degree that would guarantee her genuinely big laughs. One too many references to her professional achievements prevent us from connecting completely with her personal disasters.

Fiona O'Loughlin, by contrast, is fantastically eager to make herself look like a complete dickhead. This vulnerability continues to feed her colossal strength as a comedian.

Cries of overwrought terror from her audience are just as common as laughter. O'Loughlin's convoluted, appalling picture of maternal life in all its seething resentment shouldn't be funny.

Actually, it probably shouldn't be legal.

When Alice Spring's most celebrated domestic tragedy talks about her smoking, wild arrogance and fits of mini-bar excess, you don't know whether to cackle or phone a welfare hotline.

For all their bravery, O'Loughlin, Chillura and Millers each reminds their audience that, really, they do love their kids after all. Denise Scott doesn't feel at all obliged to soften her maternal nastiness with declarations of love.

Co-starring with her son in an all-singing, all-dancing hour of magnificent vitriol, Scott affirms her status as one of the country's funniest curmudgeons.

Scott's firstborn, 19-year-old Jordie Lane, has inherited the gene for comic timing. He's also a proficient and promising musician who augments the show with some first-rate playing.

Scott and Lane take total advantage of a dynamic that can't be synthesised. This filial friction is achingly funny.